 | Issue: | EMEA 2014 |
| Article no.: | 16 | |
| Topic: | How our virtual and digital life influences our mobile payment and messaging habits | |
| Author: | Gerald Tauchner | |
| Title: | CEO | |
| Organisation: | DIMOCO | |
| PDF size: | 381KB |
About author
With the aim to make the mobile phone a modern pocket book, Gerald Tauchner and his brother Roland Tauchner founded DIMOCO in the year 2000. The two brothers thus joined the ranks of pioneers in the mobile industry, especially in the field of the first payment possibilities via the mobile phone. What began as an idea has become a success story, 14 years later. During this time Gerald Tauchner, together with Roland Tauchner, developed the company’s business to become one of the leading mobile operator payment and mobile messaging providers in the European market. DIMOCO offers companies the possibility to bill their digital content via the consumer’s mobile phone account and to handle their mobile messaging transactions.
Before becoming proprietor and CEO of DIMOCO, the Marketing graduate was head of sales at Feibra, Austria’s leading advertising distributer.
Article abstract
We are only at the beginning of our digital life, with the increasing focus on mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile health and many other segments.
With a handset penetration rate of more than 120 percent in Europe, direct carrier billing represents an opportunity to implement a ubiquitous payment mechanism.
Digitalism not only influences our payment behavior; it has also changed our ways of communicating with people and companies.
Full Article
Producing, consuming, using, sharing – it’s all about digital and virtual content and we are speaking about music, software, books, newspapers, pictures, videos, chats, dating services and many, many more contents and services on the World Wide Web. It became our daily digital and virtual life to use smartphone, tablets and co. as our new media channels and as if we had never lived without them.
Juniper Research confirms that more than 130 million Western European smartphone owners accessed social media sites on their handsets in 2012; Facebook alone has more than 870 million users worldwide on mobile handsets and tablets, while Twitter has around 175 million. According to Ooyala, more than one-third of tablet viewing time is used to watch content of more than an hour in length while Adobe reports that average session time – for all tablet content – is 24 minutes, versus 13 minutes on a smartphone.
But screens are not only used separately. People are media meshing – performing a second media activity related to their TV viewing (posting on social media about the TV programme) and media stacking – performing an unrelated media activity (playing games on their tablets) while watching TV. According to OFCOM’s 2013 Communications Market Report, 25% of UK adults now media mesh and 49% media stack; amongst tablet owners, 81% media mesh and/or media stack.
Could you imagine living without a smartphone today? Isn’t your tablet just better than carrying five tons of books to your holiday destination? Would you ever send pictures on a CD via post before uploading them in your cloud and just sending the link through email? Even renting a video has never been easier before. Going to the DVD shop was just replaced by an easy click. The European digital content market is expected to grow from an estimated 15.8 billion Euro in 2012 to just under 29 billion Euro in 2017. (Juniper Research)
Our digital habits have changed. They changed so much that not only content and services have become digital and virtual – our way of paying for these has also been re-invented. In our fast-paced and at the same time comfortable world we have to think about payment methods which can easily be used by consumers and content providers. Mobile operator payment is such a method. It allows consumers to bill their digital content within seconds and without the need to type in passwords or filling out long forms. Digital content providers benefit from advantages like a broader reach and a higher conversion rate. “Direct carrier billing implementations have seen 10 – 14 times the conversion rate of credit card initial transaction rates and content providers have also seen average transaction values rise by more than 40%”, Juniper Research states.
More than 283 million adults across Europe do not own a debit card; furthermore, the rapidly increasing number of 12-15 year old smartphone users are also unable to purchase content this way. So, instead of missing target groups and sales potential while offering payment methods which can only be used by approximately 10 up to 50 percent of the population in the European countries, everyone has a cell phone and can use mobile operator payment to bill digital content. With a handset penetration of more than 120 percent in Europe, direct carrier billing represents an opportunity to implement a ubiquitous payment mechanism. Juniper Research believes that the value of digital content billed via direct carrier billing will increase from just under 790 million Euro in 2012 to more than 5.2 billion in 2017, representing average annual growth over the forecast period of 46%.
“The beauty of the direct carrier billing process lies in its simplicity and ubiquity: if enabled, it can be utilised by anyone with a mobile phone, allowing content providers to monetise digital content through the hundreds of millions of consumers who lack credit or debit cards, or who simply don’t want to register a card. Where carrier billing has been deployed, not only do conversion rates rise sharply, but there is a marked increase in average transaction values”, says Juniper’s Research Director, Dr Windsor Holden. Content providers are recommended to ensure that their billing platforms enable direct carrier billing via PCs and TVs, to monetize the multiscreen content opportunity.
But digitalism not only influences our payment behavior; it has also changed our ways of communicating with people and companies. According to Portio Research, the European application-to-person (A2P) and the person-to-application (P2A) market will increase from 184 billion text messages in 2012 up to 283 billion text messages in 2017. SMS is and will remain the
future of an important market. If we think about companies communicating with their customers and vice versa, there are many different ways to use the mobile messaging channel. Online service providers, for example, are using the mobile messaging channel to increase their security standards. Time-limited pin codes are sent to the consumers’ cell phone after the cell phone number has been entered online and typed in on the laptop or PC screen to achieve more security within a simple two-way-authentification.
We are only at the beginning of our digital life, using mobile payments and messaging to influence us in a positive way. “With the increasing focus on mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile health and many other segments, we believe that the contribution of the A2P and P2A category will increase over the next five years. According to our forecasts, close to a quarter of total text messages will either originate from or terminate at an application server by the end of 2017”, says Karl Whitfield, Commercial Director at Portio Research.
This digitalism opened up new opportunities for companies and consumers at the same time. The so called and often mentioned revolution became an evolution. We are talking about a still growing and never ending development of our digital and virtual life which will also influence our mobile payments and messaging habits.
